Friday, September 29, 2006

Warning: Some of the videos linked here are poor quality, because they were taped in the 80s on VHS, and then transferred to digital.

Another warning: Clicking through all of these links will waste a lot of time, regardless of the quality. It’s hard to resist the pull of nostalgia.

Andrea was on the phone with her sister last night, and I don’t know what they were talking about, but for some reason the song “Mack the Knife” was mentioned. Andrea didn’t remember the song, so, since I was sitting beside her on the couch, I started humming it, so that she’d remember it. And then her sister and I, trying to jog her memory, both mentioned the McDonalds commercial with the moon-faced guy, who used to sing “Mac Tonight”. But she didn’t remember that, either.

So when she got off the phone, I pulled out the laptop, and went to find a version of “Mack the Knife” for her to listen to, because I was sure she knew it—she just didn’t remember. After a few minutes trying unsuccessfully to find an MP3 of “Mack the Knife”—especially the Bobby Darin version, which is considered nowadays to be the canonical version—I finally had a thought: Why not try my new best friend, YouTube? So I found a video of him singing it, from 1959. It was sort of vaguely familiar to Andrea, so I went looking for the McDonalds commercial. I found this version, which didn’t seem quite right, and then I found the perfect version, which she definitely remembered. (“Come on make it Mac tonight!”)

Also, for some bizarre reason, we watched a few videos of people playing old NES games. We saw a few “Megaman” clips, and a long clip—we didn’t watch the whole thing—of a game I used to love, called “Master Blaster”. Also, at some point, possibly earlier on, when we were still in the 80s frame of mind, we watched “Asteroids”.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

According to this post, on the Ubuntu Wiki—a good use for a wiki—I may still be able to install Ubuntu (or some other Linux distro) on my laptop.

The quickplay feature will still work as long as you don’t delete the 1GB partition on installation. It will be a choice in GRUB. Also, when you hit the quickplay button to turn the computer on, it will simply start normal and you just choose it in grub. …. I would also recommend making the recovery CD’s before doing anything to windows since you may have to reinstall it for service from HP.

So there might be hope for Ubuntu on my laptop yet. Unfortunately, the laptop being referred to is a slightly different model from mine, but I think it’s still applicable. As long as the QuickPlay being referred to is the Windows Embedded version, and not the Linux version that HP used to ship on their laptops.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

There are a couple of items going around in the news, right now, and I thought I’d give my take on them.

Note: I wrote this during, and between, various conference calls today. I’m hoping that it’s coherent, but by the time I finished, I’d read it over too many times, and wasn’t able to pay attention anymore…

Chávez at the UN

First off, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called President Bush the devil at the United Nations last week. This is all over the media right now, and, in a certain sense, they’re blowing it out of proportion. Yes, it’s true that he called Bush the devil, and no, I don’t believe that President Bush is actually the devil. And neither does Mr. Chávez. And neither does anyone who heard him speak. To quote an article I read—one of the few that was written fairly reasonably:

Maybe Chávez did himself, his larger alternative agenda and his country a disservice by treating the UN podium as the set of his weekly TV show at home. His “The Devil is Mr. Bush” riff—an obviously allegorical one if you ask me—delivered with an actor’s dramatic flair and a good deal of humor risked drowning out other important messages he did deliver. For example, how many know that he laid out an innovative four-point program to renew and reform the UN—and spoke eloquently about how and why this “era is giving birth to a heart”?

For sure, the speech was far from a model of diplomatic rhetoric. But that didn’t seem to bother the scores of experienced delegate-diplomats in the hall, who greeted Chávez’s speech with wild applause. (When Bush spoke the day before, the General Assembly’s hall sounded like a morgue.) That reaction, as an incisive Washington Post article points out, shows that Chávez’s words, while “harsh…in many ways…merely expressed in bolder terms what a number of other world leaders and foreign diplomats believe.” Moreover, to be fair, how much diplomatic tact does Chávez owe to a President whose administration supported a coup against him?

Personally, when we saw part of Chávez’ speech (on The Daily Show), both Andrea and myself burst out laughing. Here’s a taste:

And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulfur still today.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.

When he said that he could still smell the sulfur, that’s when Andrea and I started laughing. Oh Chávez…

Look, I fully realize that Chávez is a bit over the top when he speaks. (It’s probably part of the reason that he’s so incredibly popular with the people of Venezuela.) But, as the Nation article above pointed out, the media is so concerned with the word “devil” that they’re not even thinking aboutthe rest of Chávez’ speech. (Which is Conservative Tactic #1: Smear the person, and ignore the arguments.)

I mentioned that I saw this on The Daily Show, but I was disappointed by Stewart’s reaction, because he took the same line as everyone else. “Really, Mr. Chávez? The devil? I may not agree with the president on a lot of things, but he’s not the devil…” (not an actual quote, as far as I remember, just a paraphrase). I just rolled my eyes at this. How many times has Stewart called someone “a douchebag”—are we really to assume that Jon Stewart thinks these people are life-sized walking douchebags? No, of course not. But for some reason, when Chávez calls Bush the devil, we’re supposed to think that he was being literal. (Stewart, of course, is a comedian, not a journalist, so he gets a bit more leeway. It’s even possible that he was making the same point I am, and was trying to lampoon the media, in his segment—although, if that’s the case, it didn’t come across. The rest of the media, however, does not get any leeway.)

Clinton on FOX News

The other item in the media involves President Clinton. Now, Clinton was an extremely popular president, and his popularity is still very high. There is no comparison between a man like Clinton, who knows all of the issues and can speak intelligently about them, and Bush, who never speaks about anything with anyone, because that would be a security breach. But that doesn’t mean that I’m a big fan of Clinton; in terms of foreign policy, Clinton was a lot more like the conservatives than the liberals would like to admit. He helped to push through NAFTA, which liberals really don’t like. In short, Clinton wasn’t a liberal, he was a neo-liberal.

(But if I go on too much in this vein, I’ll start to talk about the Democratic party in the States, and the fact that they’re not really liberals either, but call themselves liberals, and other liberals—like The Nation magazine—will also call them liberals, simply because they’re so deeply entrenched in the “two party system” mentality that it’s “us vs. them”, and “if the Republicans are conservatives, than the Democrats must be liberals”, etc. etc.)

Clinton was on FOX News on Sunday, being interviewed by Chris Wallace, who tried to take Clinton to task for not capturing Osama Bin Laden when he had the chance. This has been a standard talking point with the Republicans since 9/11: “It’s not our fault, it’s Clinton’s fault!” A quote from another Nation article:

Clinton used an appearance with “Fox News Sunday’s” Chris Wallace to challenge the lies of the Bush administration and its media acolytes. The interview, which was broadcast over the weekend, got to the heart of what’s wrong not with the Bush presidency but with a media that covers that presidency from the on-bended-knee position.

Clinton recognized that Wallace, one of the more competent members of the Fox team, was under pressure to mouth the Republican talking points that the network uses as its reference points. And the former president pounced on that vulnerability.

When Wallace started in on the “Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President?” line of questioning, Clinton leapt.

“Okay, let’s talk about it,” the former president began. “I will answer all of those things on the merits, but I want to talk about the context (in) which this (discussion) arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network… ABC just had a right-wing conservative (program) on “The Path to 9/11” falsely claim that it was… based on the 911 Commission Report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission Report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough claimed (in the 1990s) that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said (then) that I did too much. Same people.”

And later:

Wallace finally asked: “Do you think you did enough, sir?”

Clinton replied: “No, because I didn’t get him.”

Wallace chirped, “Right.”

Clinton countered, “But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country: Dick Clarke. So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know…”

Stung, Wallace was again interrupting. But Clinton held firm. “I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you’ve asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked ‘Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole?’ I want to know how many you asked ‘Why did you fire Dick Clarke?’ I want to know…”

“We ask plenty of questions of…” sputtered Wallace.

“Tell the truth…” Clinton shot back, before revealing that he had Wallace’s number.

“You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because (Fox owner) Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on Climate Change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about (climate change.) You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.”

Nice. Regardless of my feelings about Clinton on other issues, when it comes to Osama Bin Laden, I don’t have any blame to lay on his doorstep. He did try to do the right thing, and treat Osama as a threat, and it all fell on the floor when Bush took over. (I’ve been thinking about picking up Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, but haven’t done so, yet.)

I mostly bring this up because the media will do what the media always does, and treat it like a “he said / she said” type of argument. And when this happens, part of the truth gets lost; when the media does this, it makes it sound like “both the Republicans and the Democrats”—because it’s always reduced to Republican vs. Democrat—“have valid points, and we’re just being un-biased, and reporting both sides.” Even though, in this case, Clinton is correct, that will get lost—because it’s no longer about “correct vs. incorrect” in the media, it’s about “Republican vs. Democrat”.

Just because there are two sides to a story, it doesn’t mean that both of those sides are valid positions. In this case, the Republicans claim that Clinton didn’t do enough to capture Bin Laden, and therefore, it’s his fault that 9/11 happened. That’s demonstrably false. But when the media reports on it—and it’s not just FOX News, even if they are the biggest culprits—they’ll say “the Republicans say ‘it’s Clinton’s fault’, and Clinton says ‘no it’s not’”, and this is all the context the viewers will ever get. They’ll claim that what they’re doing is being “un-biased”, but in effect, what they’re actually doing is making an invalid position seem valid—in other words, they’re being biased toward the conservatives.

And it’s so predominantly the case that the few lone voices who try and raise these points seem like conspiracy theorists, or are simply dismissed as “liberal right-wingers”. It’s part of the reason that I recommend Chomsky’s book Necessary Illusions so strongly; it helps the reader to be more critical of the media, and ask the right questions, instead of falling under the “he said / she said” sway.

A final passage from the article:

When a beaten Wallace tried to cover for himself—“…all I can say is, I’m asking you in good faith because it’s on people’s minds, sir. And I wasn’t…”—Clinton nailed him: “There’s a reason it’s on people’s minds. That’s the point I’m trying to make. There’s a reason it’s on people’s minds because they’ve done a serious disinformation campaign to create that impression.”

Love Bill Clinton or hate him, but understand that his appearance on Fox New Sunday was one of those rare moments in recent American history when a target of our drive-by media shot back.

Monday, September 25, 2006

I had previously written about change. However, there is also something to be said for constancy and stability. Some people don’t like change; they don’t trust it. Some people would prefer their lives to remain as they are. Sure, they may not be perfect, but the devil you know is better than the one you don’t, right?

Not that I have anything against change. I like it. Change makes me nervous, but nervous in a good way. Contemplating change often conjures up a bit of nervous apprehension, along with the positive visions and anticipation of what might be. When I wrote the change post, I was contemplating change, and since that time, the anticipation was growing and growing. I was starting to look forward to change, and all of the positive benefits it would bring.

But now I’m contemplating constancy and stability. That’s good, too. There are areas of the world that cry out for stability, but may never get it. Perhaps we should treasure stability when we have it. But… now that I’ve been anticipating change for so long, I’m not eager to give it up. I’m not a fan of “change for change’s sake”, personally, but on the other hand, when you’ve been looking forward to change for so long, the idea of sticking with constancy and stability isn’t all that thrilling. Tim Robbins said

Life isn’t stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can’t have both. Take your choice. As for me, I’ll choose a free, organic society over a rigid, artificial society any day.

I don’t know who Tim Robbins was—and, as usual, I’m too lazy to look the fact up—but it sounds like he wasn’t really in favour of stability. Then again, it also sounds like he was talking in the general sense, not in a personal sense. Most of the quotes I found on stability and constancy were also like that. (And none seemed to be in favour.)

P.S. I’m being a bit elliptic, but I fully realize that this post is probably fairly transparent. I’m sure you can all guess what’s going on. But I’ve decided not to spell it out, nor confirm or deny what I’m talking about if you ask me about it.

P.P.S. On the other hand, maybe it’s not transparent, and you’ll all start making wild and inaccurate guesses as to what I’m talking about. But I’m still not going to bother confirming or denying what I’m talking about.

Firstly, remember when I mentioned the bad week I had? Well, most people I know—and some I don’t—also had a bad week that week. (The next week pretty much slipped by uneventfully; I’d be interested to know if everyone else’s did too.)

Secondly, I haven’t been interested in blogging lately. Oh sure, I’ve been posting once in a while, including a couple of MSN conversations—which is kind of a cop out, because it doesn’t take any thought; just monkey work to format it all—but I haven’t really had an urge to come here and wax thoughtful. And the coincidence part is that a lot of other bloggers have been feeling the same way. A lot of bloggers have simply given up, and stopped posting to their blogs; a lot of the others have been posting, but such half-hearted posts that you can tell they’re not really into it.

Maybe it’s the time of year. Perhaps, when the weather starts to get a bit cooler, people start to get melancholy, and introspective. Then again, I would have assumed that feeling melancholy and introspective would spark blog posts, rather than hindering them. If it really is because people are feeling melancholy, then I’d expect a sea of amateurish, semi-nihilist poetry, and poorly-written treatises on the meaning—or meaninglessness—of life. Blogging is, after all, about the most narcissistic communication medium of the 20th century. It’s a breeding ground for that kind of writing. So I guess my theory doesn’t hold water.

As an aside: I realize that I didn’t start blogging until the 21st century, but blogging has been around since the late 90s or so. (Blogger was started in 1999, but the concept pre-dated Blogger, I think.) I’d been interested in blogging since almost the beginning, based on some buzz I was seeing in places like Wired, but it wasn’t until I started actively following some blogs—and realized how vapid and useless most are—that I realized that you don’t have to have anything deep or meaningful to say, to have a blog. It’s just a creative outlet. I guess, in retrospect, that it’s a bit strange that I was convinced to start blogging because most blogs are useless.

I should probably end this post with a paragraph that sums it up, but I got nothin’. I can say this, though: I’m actually feeling pretty good these days. Don’t be fooled by the tone of this post; I’m not feeling melancholy or introspective myself. Being disinterested in blogging isn’t the same as being disinterested in life. And I’m sure not going to stop blogging, because I know that I’ll get interested again, and probably soon.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

I bought a new laptop last week, to take advantage of the back to school sales. And I was going to write about it here, but then I ended up talking about it with a friend on Messenger, and decided to just post that, instead.

sernaferna says:BTW, I just bought a new , too. A .

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says: I bought a . A dell.

sernaferna says:Nice. As I've mentioned before, I like Dell...

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:me too. but I bought a desktop. i'm so excited, serna!

sernaferna says:And well you should be.

sernaferna says:I love the new , too, but there is a bit of a problem with it:

It's an HP, and they seem to have done something strange with the partioning on the hard drive. So I may not be able to install Linux on it.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:How about that umtumbu thing?

sernaferna says:Ubuntu. That's what I wanted to install.

sernaferna says:But HP included a *very cool* utility, with the , where you don't have to boot up to watch DVDs. You can press a special button, and it will load up a specialized little operating system that just plays DVDs (or music CDs, or, I think, MP3's or WMA's.)

sernaferna says:Unfortunately, if you re-partition the drive, such as you would have to do for Ubuntu (or any other operating system), apparently that utility doesn't work anymore.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:Hrm. So, it's one or the other. Can you add a second hard drive, instead of partitioning the single?

sernaferna says:Not on a , unfortunately.

sernaferna says:But even if I did... I think it would *still* cause problems..

sernaferna says:There is a mini little program, in the 's BIOS, called the "boot loader", which decides which operating system to load up. Usually, there is only one to choose from ().

sernaferna says:On this computer, there are 2: , or the QuickPlay thing. (Which, actually, is a specialized version of , without the UI.)

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:And you can't add a 3rd?

sernaferna says:But the determines which to load; if you start up the by pressing the Power button, it loads . If you press the "DVD" button, or the "QuickPlay" button, it loads the other.

sernaferna says:If you load Ubuntu, or other operating systems, they will replace the 's boot loader with their own. You'll then get a menu, when you load up the - "do you want to load , or Ubuntu?"

sernaferna says:But the QuickPlay option will become toast.

sernaferna says:Of course, I *might* give up on the QuickPlay thing altogether... If I want to watch a DVD or whatever, I'll just load up . (Or Linux - surely they've got programs that will play DVD's, and probably do a better job of it.)sernaferna says:It just sucks, because it was a really cool feature that HP provided, and I'd be disappointed if I'd have to give it up.

Even if it turns out to be something that I rarely, if ever, use... lol

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:Yeah, I don't understand the real selling point to not having to load Windows. It's not like it's that arduous of a process.

sernaferna says:Well, I was playing around with the QuickPlay thing, and it loads up in a couple of seconds. So it *is* kind of handy.

sernaferna says:On the other hand, the is so frigging powerful that even only takes about 30 seconds to load, so it's not THAT much of a savings...

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:Huh.

sernaferna says:Please tell me you haven't closed this window...

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:I haven't.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:Did you want part of the conversation?

sernaferna says:Phew!

sernaferna says:I was about to ask you if I could post it to my blog. I was *going* to write about the whole thing on there, but then I figured that, since I've already explained it all here, I could just copy 'n paste it.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:Yay infamy again!

sernaferna says:And then, of course, Live crashed my .

Didn't just crash - it brought down my whole desktop.

sernaferna says:So, yeah, if you could send that, that would be great. lol

sernaferna says:I'll just have to try and remember where I put which emoticons... lol

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:How do you want it? I can just save the txt as an rtf file?